Grad student Pam Dalal has been awarded a major University of California Transportation Center Dissertation Grant for the Spring 2011 award cycle. “Competition for this round of UCTC dissertation grants was strong,” according to UCTC Director Robert Cervero, who added that “You might have heard that funding for USDOT’s University Transportation Centers (UTC) program, which includes UCTC, has been discontinued for FY 2011-2012. Since your dissertation grant is being funded out of the FY 2010-2011 budget, this de-funding of future UTC activities will not affect your grant.”
The independent panel that evaluated Pam’s proposal, “Behavioral change and life course turning points in activity processes,” commented: “The student proposes a topic that involves extending travel behavior analysis to extremely long term activity patterns. Her proposal was extremely well written, and she has a well laid out plan that defined the problem of life cycle patterns, suggested a modeling framework based on characterizing habit and socialization as temporal variables that affect activity choices, and also presents a data source that can be feasibly used to estimate the variables.”
Pam came to UCSB Geography in 2007 from the University of Tennessee where she received her BA in Geography and was a Research Assistant with the Geographic Information Science and Technology group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She received her MA in 2009 with a thesis titled “Exploring the Relationships among Transportation, Accessibility, Education, and Equity in Sylhet, Bangladesh.” Regarding Pam’s UCTC grant, her dissertation adviser Kostas Goulias stated: “Pam did a great job writing this proposal and major congratulations are in order.” Indeed, they are, from all of us!
